Saturday, June 2, 2018

(Portland, Maine) - Erica Beck Spencer has
been sailing J/24s for a long time with her Portland, Maine based team
on Sea Bags Women’s Sailing Team. She offers her thoughts here on how she has continued to improve their performance over time.

“Mike Ingham and his team just won the J/24 North American 2018
Championship. Mike is one of our mentors and we couldn’t be more proud
of his team. In our 3.5 year tenure as an all-women’s team he has stood
out as someone who always takes the time to lend advice and answer our
many questions. For example, on day one of my first world championship
as the skipper for a team at the 2017 Worlds in Toronto Canada, I
questioned if I belonged at this event. I felt serious butterflies. He
was the mentor I wanted to talk to. After I found him, he took time out
of his pre-worlds’-morning routine to ask me just the right questions
and to evaluate my nervousness. He convinced me that everyone is feeling
some level of nerves and that the expert athlete needs to figure out
how to compete at the highest level with those nervous feelings.
Sometimes that means talking to teammates about how you’re feeling and
to ask for what you need from them, sometimes that means just getting
comfortable with that jittery feeling, breathing through it, and knowing
what it is like to compete with them.

At
every event we’re both at, we find him and ask him questions.
Inevitably paper and pens come out and we draw things and describe what
we’d see on the water or boat in order to really learn—he doesn’t just
answer our questions, he makes sure we understand the answers to our
questions. My notebook has many “Mike Ingham Originals” as he often
grabs it and draws sails, local conditions, or tactical situations. At
the NA’s, Mike met with us for ten minutes as his team waited to leave
for dinner, to talk about local knowledge. Currents coming through the
race course from three different outlets heavily influenced local
conditions—he reviewed all of this. After a thorough local knowledge
talk, he challenged us with a question and didn’t give us the answer. In
fact, he said, “Don’t answer now, walk away, think about it, and text
me later.”

The question was a starting line situation. He asked, if the line is
square to the wind, and the wind is equal across the line, but the
current is coming across the line from the boat end to the pin end,
which end of the line is favored? I’m not going to answer the question
which we eventually got to, but I will say that we walked away thinking
about it, talked to friends, and around 10pm we texted him our best
answer. He responded with another question when we got it wrong. (In
Mike Ingham fashion, I ask you to put your answers to the question on
the Facebook post in the comments and we’ll see what happens. Have fun!)

My
point in sharing all of this is to say that people like Mike are so
good at this sport that they can teach you everything they know and
still beat you the majority of the time on the race course. Perhaps
karma played into his victory, I wouldn’t be surprised. He’s got a lot
of it. But to watch a mentor win the whole darn thing and to still have
made time to share his expertise throughout the event—well that just is
the true definition of sportsmanship.

Congrats to you and your team Mike! Job well done! Thanks for being someone to emulate!”

Stay tuned to this blog. As requested, this self-proclaimed (and
competitor confirmed) regatta nerd and blogger will be digging into her
notebook to share some of our biggest take aways from our fellow
competitors as well as from the Quantum and North dock talks.